Weeknotes 350

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Weeknotes

The good Tracy Durnell wrote about why they write #weeknotes earlier this week and I’ve been thinking about it all weekend, especially as this edition reaches the 350 milestone. Also, a big thanks to Tracy for shouting this very blog in the post! *waves at new readers*.

I’m going to pull the same quote as Paul did also writing about Tracy’s post:

Weeknotes are a means to shape my own behavior. Headings serve as prompts: knowing I have a slot in the template waiting for me to fill in on Fridays is a reminder — and motivation — for me to do things that I value but might not make time for (like listen to new music). Because I design my own format, weeknotes reinforce my priorities.

This is it exactly it – Bang on.

I went back and looked at my first proper #weeknotes from 2018 and tried to put myself in the headspace I was in back then. I started these #weeknotes back then to track and externalise my goals in public. Funnily enough the post is called ‘Minister of My Own Labor’. If headings serve as prompts as tracy says then the structure of these #weeknotes with which you are all so familiar now is there already:

A bit of narrative essay up to – LOL I’m talking about how I hate news and trying to disconnect from social media (nothing changes), I write about what work I’d done that week as I was setting myself up as a freelancer, I talked about what I was reading and I wrote about what music was good. It’s all there.

I seem to remember that I was inspired to write and format my #weeknotes from Dan Hon’s Things That Caught My Attention Newsletter, and Warren Ellis’ Orbital Operations. I also remember that I put the music section at the bottom because I listen to a lot of music and I think its important to share ones taste in such matters at every possible opportunity.

As the years slipped by and my audience grew my #weeknotes sort of morphed into a newsletter. Sections have come and gone but the core of it has stayed the same. I’ve often thought about giving these #weeknotes a snappy name, making it a newsletter, but then they would become something else – and I’m fine with it how it is. This is my blog, my little home page on the Internet that also sends emails when I choose to send them.

But ultimately the important thing is that my #weeknotes are still achieving the thing I wanted them to back when I started them. Just like Tracy:

Weeknotes let me externalize my internal goals. I’ve had trouble sticking to goals I’ve set for myself in the past, with external accountability being a much more powerful driver. They provide gentle accountability through publishing them publicly. Committing to publishing gives me a specific time to do them and helps me follow through on actually completing the weeknotes.

It feels like #weeknotes have been a thing ‘forever’ but Matt Webb(!) wrote the first proper #weeknotes back 2009 – which is quite late in the blogging era!

Matt wrote about the pre-history of #weeknotes in 2018 and it’s has always been interesting to me that they emerged from companies – ones that people with existing blogging practices working at them obviously – they created a sort of public transparent diary for a shared project – which I really appreciate.

Another well known UK tech bod Matt Jukes wrote about ‘The Why of Weeknotes‘ back in 2017 whilst still being a tech / project based thing personal #weeknotes were emerging at the time. (Btw Jukes’ article also mentions Dan and Warren as inspirations)

Like anything blogging benefits from practice and I just wanted the discipline of a weekly commitment. I certainly didn’t expect anyone to read them — they were / are a very selfish format of writing — introspective to a fault. When everyone else has been about the ‘quantified self’ I was more about ‘qualitative self’ 🙂

Personal #weeknotes have taken over the baton in many places around the blogosphere (though I always write #weeknotes at work when I’m managing a project of any sufficient duration) and my own #weeknotes have now been running for 6 years, which is a lot of weeks – 350 of em! LOL. But Matts three elements I think still hole true across the spectrum who’s writing them and why:

However the weeknotes format has evolved, I think three qualities endure:

• some kind of rhythm. Obviously. Weekly? Probably. Possibly. Aspirationally anyway.
• a feeling of being in the middle of things. The rhythm helps with that: a regular sampling frequency means you don’t just report on projects and ideas when they’re finished, which is the normal temptation. Benefit: the “work in progress” feeling encourages others to jump in.
• written by an individual. The person with the conch might change week to week, but in my view the single perspective is vital. Individuals have fully rounded interests: yes this person is reporting on projects, but they’re also alive with feelings, and oh by the way they’ve also gone out and got ice creams for the office because it was hot this week.

I’ll add a last: the joy of weeknotes is just as much in the writing as the reading.

Aside from Tracy’s blog, here are some of the #weeknotes that are currently active in my RSS reader:

• Doug Belshaw
• Adam Englebright
• Giles Turnbull
• Neil Williams
• Garrett Coakley
• Benjy Stanton
• Paul Graham Raven

If you write #weeknotes and read mine please comment with a link below!

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PermanentlyMoved

Photo 365

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

• Went for drinks with Matt Webb
• Went for drinks with Mat in my band
• Long call and a meeting about the Sekret Project
  • Lots of ‘Notion dumping’
  • Steelmanning objections to the idea. took all day
• Call with Goblin from tonk.gg
• Did some consulting on Vtubers – wild that this blog post is still literally paying dividends.
• Started reading/researching internal family systems as its very important for game design reasons.

Terminal Access

Following Robert Downey Jr’s return the MCU as Dr Doom Simon de la Rouviere did a really cool exploration of worlds and audience types. Any blogpost that has a 2×2 like this in it is OK by me!

The audience is actively present outside the story.

This is where I put RDJ’s recasting as Dr. Doom. Even if there’s an eventual in-universe reason (somehow it’s a Tony Stark variant or something), it treats a usually passive awareness in cast choice as now actively engaging its audience. The audience is present in the story through a strange meta-attachment to the story itself. Regardless of what the in-universe explanation is (or isn’t), fans will relate to their feelings of OG RDJ as Iron Man. It’s not breaking a 4th wall, but some 5th wall, because it asks the story to not only leave its domain into the audience, but to bring it back into the story. The audience isn’t just present, but has become a conduit.

On the Blog

History of Computing Books

I blurbed and wrote up a long list of all the history of computing books i’ve read over the last few years

Dipping the Stacks

How Actors Remember Their Lines | The MIT Press Reader

In the course of studying the poem, he came to a deep understanding of Milton. Said Basinger: During the incessant repetition of Milton’s words, I really began to listen to them, and every now and then as the poem began to take shape in my mind, an insight would come, an understanding, a delicious possibility.

Tech Reviewers Write Reviews for Each Other, Not for the Public

It’s similar with CPUs/SoCs and laptops – marketing and reviews overemphasize performance to a degree that just doesn’t match the lived experience of most consumers.

The Paradigm Wars—Part 3: A Wrench in the Fabric of Reality: a new paradigm?

I offer the following hypothesis: we are living through—and part of—a paradigm break between those on the side of ‘the machine’—the matrix of man-made, techno-pharmacological dominance of nature, culture, mind, body, soul and spirit—and those for whom this mechanistic paradigm has reached its end.

The lawsuit that could bring reggaetón to its knees

According to the legal complaint, the defendants have sampled and “mathematically copied” for decades what in the meantime had become the Dem Bow rhythm.

Teenagers Incur Unpayable Emotional Debt by Living at the Speed of Light

We’re always grieving because there’s no time to just be. No customs tie the world together. No culture is shared except that of distraction and addiction. We can’t sit in silence or solitude because there’s this constant buzzing noise and we’re never alone even if we always feel lonely.

Reading

I enjoyed Steve Lyons’ Death Korps of Krieg book Siege of Vraks so much I burnt though ‘Dead Men Walking’. It was very Warhammer 40k, explosions. Grimness. Death.

I inhaled the audio book of A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age this week. So good.

In one of those weeks where I’m in between finishing books. I have A lot on the go right now:

• Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life by James Holis
• Puppets, Gods, and Brands: Theorizing the Age of Animation from Taiwan by Teri J. Silvio
• Dead Famous: An Unexpected History of Celebrity from Bronze Age to Silver Screen by Greg Jenner
• I also read a short novella as a test reader that someone sent me.

Fatal Attraction – Katie Malco

My old friend Katie Malco unfortunately has seen her rehearsal studio burn down. She and a lot of other people have lost all their equipment.

Putting this fundraiser link here incase anyone is feeling generous.

Here’s a video of her new single recorded in one of the empty parts of the the lock up days before the fire:

The full single features Laura Stevenson and has a great video.

Remember Kids:

Every time you meet someone and establish your relationship to each other, you are bringing together multiple universes

Sand Talk by Tyson Yunkaporta